I recently just finished a book with the small group Bible Study I lead on Wednesday nights. The book was called Hope Lives by Amber Van Schooneveld. We have been working through this book for a couple of months now, and God has been opening up my heart to things that I will be experiencing in the year to come. Hope Lives is a book about a journey, a journey that the author encourages the readers to take. It challenged me to love people no matter who or where they are. I absolutely love other cultures, but this book really drove home to me how much God talks about loving the poor and the widows in the Bible. James 1:27 says, “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure
and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless. This is the kind of love I want to give everyone. Not only in the next year when I am away, but even now, my prayer is that God would fill me with a love that I have never known.
Isaiah 58:6-7 says, “Is not this the kind of fasting I have chose: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter-when you see the naked, to clothes
him, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?” Again, we are called to serve those in need, to set the oppressed free.
As I think about the World Race 2010, I am learning what it means to act out my faith by taking care of those in need and setting the oppressed free with the love of Jesus.
